The New Normal

Dana is hosting the 5th annual Blogging for LGBT families day, and that seems like a good excuse to get back in the business of blogging again. So here goes....

Hello blog and readers: I've missed you. What have I been doing, you wonder? Probably what many of you have been doing: wrapping up a university semester, looking forward to the end of the elementary school year, figuring how how to help some Daisy Girl Scouts bridge to Brownies, experimenting with different bread recipes and coming to terms with the fact that Politica really can taste the tiniest bit of wheat flour if I try to sneak it into white bread.

I've been sick a fair bit, and was well-cared for by Curious Girl and Politica. They've been sick, too, and I helped take care of them. I've been reading every other week to the first grade, and I had a friend and her daughter come visit in March.

I went to work a lot, and dealt with budget problems. I signed up for a CSA, and I went to CG's spring ice show, applauding for all the children who take lessons and wanted to come out and skate to music.

I visited my parents, and had a lot of fun watching my daughter interact with my parents. We went to the beach, and collected shells, and splashed in the waves, even on the day that CG said she really was very, very sure she didn't want to go in the water and thus didn't wear her bathing suit. We went swimming in the pool every day, too, and loved watching the birds in the palm trees.

We've been eating dinner together every night (except for those terrible weeks where one or the other of us had a GI bug bad enough that it kept us from the table). We read together--Politica and I passing books back and forth between us (read Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast if you want a gripping political/historical mystery), all of us sharing the fun of Curious Girl's explorations of Edward Eager's books about children and magic (Seven-Day Magic is just wonderful).

Still reading? This is not, perhaps, the most elegant blog post I've put up, but this is the life of a lesbian family. Most of what we do is pretty darn unremarkable. Most of what we do looks a lot like what the rest of you are doing.

And most of us lgb parents could be any of your relatives. Some of us come from extended families with gay cousins, parents, aunts/uncles, or siblings; some of us seem to be the only lgb relative around. Any family can be queer. And queer....well, maybe queer will become the new normal.

That's a post for tomorrow, perhaps: how queer families can be read as more queer and less normal. But for today, I want to focus on the ways that queer families can be read as just another kind of normal: we're parents who are doing the best we can, loving our kids, helping them grow, and juggling work and home responsibilities.